WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — NASCAR typically sticks to warm-weather climates in the early months of its Cup Series season, which has historically made snow-outs a rarity.
But a winter storm paralyzed much of North Carolina on Saturday, forcing NASCAR’s season-opening Clash exhibition race to shift to Monday night (at least in the current best-case scenario). Plows and road treatments are not as common in North Carolina compared to the Northeast or Midwest, and the heavy snow that fell Saturday will still be on the ground through next week.
Even if the roads are cleared early enough on Monday for NASCAR drivers and team members to make the 60- to 90-minute drive from their Charlotte-area homes to Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium, they’ll need to pack their warmest winter gear. When the green flag flies on Monday night, it could mark the start of the coldest race in NASCAR’s nearly 80-year history.
Richmond Raceway’s 1990 spring race had a race-time temperature of 31 degrees, according to NASCAR Insights. Monday night is expected to be around 30, with temperatures dipping into the mid-20s during the race.
Drivers are usually too hot inside their boxy, sealed-off stock cars and spend the summer wearing electric cooling shirts to lower their core body temperatures. But this time, with driving gloves instead of winter gloves and racing shoes instead of snow boots, there’s a chance their extremities could feel the chill.
The problem is none of them have raced in weather quite like this, so it’s hard to know how the conditions will affect drivers.
“What do you even do?” 23XI Racing driver Tyler Reddick said, referring to equipment adjustments. “If you’re wrong, you’re going to be really hot.”
Reddick said he thought about layering up with his undergarments when the forecast was scheduled to be in the teens for the originally scheduled Sunday night race, but even that would have been a challenge. Each driver’s seat is precisely molded to the body of its driver (“it’s a really solid fit,” Reddick said), so any extra layers might make for a tight squeeze.
“It’s never been cold enough to layer up in the car or even think about it, so I guess I’ll see how cold I am first and then go from there,” Reddick said.
But his peers didn’t think it would be an issue. Defending Cup Series champion Kyle Larson said a stock car is “basically like an oven,” and even though he’d never raced in conditions quite this cold, he anticipated being plenty warm once the race begins.
“Honestly, I think it’ll feel fine for us inside the car,” Larson said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you still break somewhat of a sweat in there, just because of all the temps internally (from engine heat and other parts). It’s not windy in there because we’re going so slow.
“I just feel for the crews and mechanics and fans and NASCAR officials — everybody who is there outside in the cold.”
That’s perhaps the trickiest part, since team members will be tasked with working on the cars before practice and then again in the period between the qualifying events and the race itself.
Stock cars don’t have antifreeze and there’s no sheltered garage area at Bowman Gray — a football stadium used by Winston-Salem State University that happens to have a historic quarter-mile racetrack around the field’s perimeter. So each team will need to make sure the fluids in their cars don’t freeze while off the track, regardless of how warm the drivers might be when they eventually climb in.
Then there’s the unknown of what the weather could do to the track conditions and grip levels that drivers are accustomed to — particularly when the drivers are going slowly under a yellow flag caution period.
“The tires might get slick or the track might get slick,” Joe Gibbs Racing driver Christopher Bell said. “Factors that don’t normally come into play, such as tire temperatures, would probably be really the only thing that’s unique to these circumstances from our seat.”
This is the second year of NASCAR running its preseason race in North Carolina, after a long history in Daytona Beach, Fla. (where snow was never a concern) and a few years in Los Angeles, where incoming heavy rain before the 2024 race drove a late decision to move the event up by one day.
NASCAR knew Winston-Salem would be somewhat of a risk, but got lucky last year. Now? Not so much.
“In year one, we hit the jackpot,” said NASCAR’s Justin Swilling, who is in charge of the Clash on behalf of the sanctioning body. “This year, I wouldn’t say we’ve lost the bet, but we rolled the dice, and unfortunately, Mother Nature didn’t want us to stay on schedule.”